This is the long-awaited (i.e., pushed to the back of the bus) volume of Syd Barrett “hoax tracks.” Here we collect various “Syd” material not fit to mingle with the rest of the herd.

Rock’n’roll artists inevitably will be bootlegged if they have enough of a following to sell any records at all. It’s one measure of an artist’s worth, certainly of whether or not they’ve “made it.” (If nobody is interested in hearing your unreleased material—you haven’t.)

Some artists, however, are special. And so are their followings. If you look hard enough you can find a Uriah Heep bootleg. However, you probably won’t find anything of theirs that they never did. But in the case of the Beatles, Hendrix, Beach Boys, Dylan—Madonna, even—one fan in a million is not content merely to collect whatever material they can find. They take it a step further. They roll their own.

To my knowledge, there is perhaps two hours of spurious Syd Barrett currently in circulation. Seasoned collectors, not to mention anybody who ever cranked up Napster in search of Syd, have long been insulted by such material. This disc collects the “best” of it. Here are the ugly ducklings all in a row, swimming around in their very special play pool. They’re even more ludicrous heard one after another than they were out in the wild.

The first Syd hoaxes appeared in the early 1980s. With fewer sources of information available to the fan than can be found nowadays, they were easily fabricated. Some of them spread widely, to the point of being included on various early bootlegs.

Today, all the available unreleased material can be found elsewhere in the HYGIY? collection. Every session Syd ever took part in has been documented in David Parker’s Random Precision. When new material appears, it is possible to quickly authenticate it. If a track is bogus, LaughingMadcaps can notify thousands of fans instantly. Thus, while any eeejit can rename a file and upload it to a network, the time when it could spread unchallenged is over. In a way, this collection represents the end of the dark ages. Syd’s real fans are networked as never before.

The hoaxer is the ultimate fan-mutant (after Mark David Chapman). It’s said that the ultimate fan is inspired by their heroes to pick up an instrument and form a band. This is where the hoaxer gets it all wrong. You’re supposed to write and record your own songs. Go out there in the world and play them. Be yourself. Get a life.

The hoaxer will take a bit of music from somewhere or other and mislabel it in honor of their hero. Then they will pimp it around, saying “there’s a rumor” the artist played on a track, or this is a “rare demo” or a “previously unheard” new song. The hoaxer’s collection increases, and as the viral material spreads the hoaxer feels very pleased with himself—almost as if he’d accomplished something.

The hoaxer is a parasite. He wastes the time and energy of the real fans on his own self-aggrandizement. For this alone he deserves to be ostracized, and so he is.

Worse, he is a parasite on the artist. More often than not, the hoax is inept. Some are so bad one suspects the insult to be deliberate. On an unconscious level, of course it is. The “fan” wishes they could somehow be equal of the artist, to be noticed, to feel important, creative, to collaborate. All they lack is talent. And so they shoplift it.

In the process various bits of random, unrelated and substandard material are attributed to the artist. He can do nothing about any of this, and his reputation suffers. Nobody deserves to be slandered in this way. (For the hoaxer we’re tempted to make an exception.)

Hence, this collection. For historical purposes, to set the record straight, to clear Syd’s good name...and yeah, because these things deserve our mockery...we quarantine them.

The “Apocrypha” are various books that weren’t considered authentic enough to make it into the Bible. Some were obviously spurious, others seemed legit but parts were bogus, others just didn’t fit in. So it is with the tracks on this disc. Not every one of these is a deliberate hoax. Some of them are in a “grey area”—Syd might be involved, or we simply don’t know, but for whatever reason they can’t be placed anywhere else in the HYGIY? series.

Track 01: Twink – “Enter The Diamonds”
For title alone, we can’t think of a better opener. On Napster, this was credited to “Twink with Syd Barrett,” as if saying a thing was the same as making it so. Admittedly, that lead guitar has a similar tone and mood to Syd’s in “Gigolo Aunt.” (All the more reason to doubt it could be Syd, who never played anything the same way twice.) And yes, there is that reference to “diamonds.” But this has much more in common with the great sloppy drunken boogie of the Pink Fairies.

The fact is, this track appeared on a Twink EP called Do It ’77. It was recorded in 1977. Any questions? I pointed this out to the person from whom I downloaded it, and he said “but there’s a rumor” Syd plays on this. No. There isn’t.

If Twink had ever had Syd guesting on one of his sessions, you wouldn’t be able to shut him up about it. There’d be a big pink sticker on the cover, “featuring SYD BARRETT!!!,” cut into the shape of a crazy diamond. Ironically, the EP featured another track, “Psychedelic Punkaroo,” which Twink has since claimed was written for Syd. The fun thing about Twink is, he’ll say anything.

Track 02: Pink Floyd – “Astronomy Dominé demo”
Ahhhh… The Freak-Out Demos. I have 45 minutes of this stuff, and most of it can’t bear the light of day. Some things are too horrible to contemplate, and so most of them will not be preserved here. We’ll give you just enough to get the general idea. This tape appeared at some point in the 1980s and a few people were convinced that these were, in fact, Pink Floyd demos from the Piper era. Bernard White saw through them immediately, but the late, great Nicholas Schaffner, writing in A Saucerful Of Secrets, took them at face value. He wrote that if Syd had had his way, the final mix of Piper would have been awash in reverb and phase shift. (See what we mean about harm to the artist’s good name? People who ought to have known better were fooled into thinking Syd liked tape hiss and distortion, and enjoyed noise for its own sake.)

What we have here is one channel of the Piper track, fed into an EQ that cranked the lower frequencies while compromising everything else. Here and there, bits of incompetent/incontinent lead guitar are dubbed on top, giving the impression that Syd was in the process of learning his own song. They ran this through a few more tape decks, which changed the speed and added extra hiss. Then they inflicted it on the world.

With “fans” like these, is it any wonder Syd won’t even read their mail?

Track 03: Sun Ra, Keith Moon & Syd – “Stonehenge ’69 Solstice Session”
Somebody’s idea of a joke; a power trio from hell. In real life, these three people never met. If they had, I doubt they would have had very much to say to each other. This recording is a pleasant-enough bit of guitar strumming with flute over that. It sounds like it was done in somebody’s basement on a low-end 4-track cassette recorder, the sort that finally became affordable to amateur musicians in the late 1980s. There is no percussion at all. No keyboards either. And no Syd.

Track 04: The Beatles – “The Candle Burns (Peace Of Mind)”
Attributed to Lennon or Harrison or both, this “outfake” has been a perennial on Beatle bootlegs since the mid-1970s. It has long since been debunked and the identity of the person responsible been determined. However, there have been some attempts made to reclaim it under Syd’s name, and so we include it here. It is a decent-enough bit of psychedelia, but not very convincing as a hoax. (The Beatles, just possibly. Syd, not at all.)

Track 05: Syd Barrett – “Susan’s Lungs”
This is an insult. A portion of the “Silas Lang” backing track was fed through a flanger, and some random female intoning in French or German is dubbed on top. I guess there’s supposed to be some clever pun going on between “Silas Lang” and “Susan’s Lungs.” Some things aren’t worth taking the time to debunk, but we’ll document them all the same.

Track 06: The Beatles – “Pink Litmus Paper Shirt”
A companion piece to “Susan’s Lungs.” This one takes up where the last bit of “Silas Lang” left off, while two-part harmonies chant “You know that I’ve been hurt/Check my litmus paper shirt.” Words to live by. Pink litmus is acidic, isn’t it? Whoa, deep. Unless pink litmus is alkaline, which would explain the perception of injury—not enough acid. This track has been attributed to the Beatles, but since Syd’s music was used we include it here.

Track 07: Pink Floyd – “Julia Dream demo”
I’ve even seen a session date assigned to this one, in August of 1967. However, it’s from the Freak-Out Demos. Not everything on that tape was derived from Piper. Half the tracks feature a guitarist and bass player pretending to be Barrett and Waters. This is one of those. For what it’s worth, it’s the best track on the tape. I got it in the early 1990s and thought it was genuine. It’s plausible, anyway. That snarling guitar tone could never be Gilmour. One could imagine it to be Syd, until hearing several more Freak-Out Demos featuring the same guitar sound on tracks they never recorded.

Track 08: Syd Barrett – “Interstellar Overdrive demo”
This track has been around since the early 1980s and was considered authentic until the 31 October 1966 recording came into circulation. (It’s not far off from the Freak-Out Demos overall, but the version of “Interstellar” on that tape is infinitely worse. It’s unspeakable, and goes on for 17 minutes. This one is pretty decent.) Again, it’s a plausible hoax, purporting to be a two-guitar demo tape. However, the 1966 studio take used in the San Francisco film is closer in spirit to Love’s “My Little Red Book” than any version they did afterward. One would expect an earlier demo to have a tempo and feel even closer to the Love track. This one derives from the Piper version. I’m told the Barrett family debunked this as well. Fair enough; if Syd had owned a two-track recorder and made demos on it, they’d have been first to know.

Track 09: Syd Barrett – “Bob Dylan’s Blues demo”
Enough with the plausible—this track returns us to the land of the woefully inept. In mid-2000, I personally downloaded this track from the individual who put it into circulation. He had already been laughed out of two or three Syd forums, mostly for claiming to own tracks he couldn’t produce. His explanation for the lack of a vocal on this was priceless: “I was mailed the tape from England, and it was a multitrack. So I put it into a multitrack deck to attempt a mixdown, and I accidentally erased the vocal. Yeah I know it sucks, but” we should be grateful for what we do have, hmmmmm? Even though it was well-documented that “Bob Dylan Blues” was a two-track demo then in the possession of one David Gilmour.

Not only was he sloppy in basic research, he never bothered to check the Info fields of the MP3 he had renamed for this project. If he had, he would have altered them so nobody could tell this was really “Slide Guitar Freestyle” by Ben Harper, live on FM from Portugal in 1996.

Track 10: The Beatles – “What’s The New Mary Jane”
This White Album outtake (featuring John, George and Yoko) was a staple of pre-Anthology Beatle bootlegs; I own at least three mixes of it but used none of them here. The very track that launched the hoax was sent in by Christer Undemo of Stockholm, Sweden, who writes:

“Trying to make THE END of a very very long story about Beatles/Barrett, ‘What’s the Shame Mary Jane.’ I’m responsible for it.

“I bought a Beatles bootleg for a friend and Unforgotten Hero for me, way back in 1980-1982. After listening to Unforgotten Hero, we played the Beatles bootleg. I thought the singing on the second verse did sound very strange and not by John. So I said to my friend, who could this be, I said could it be Syd? We had seen in the Miles book that they did write about a meeting on April 15, 1967. But we couldn’t decide who was singing. So I sent this song to two friends, one in Germany and one in USA, and asked them, could this be Syd? One said no I don't think so, the other one couldn't say, like us.

”Then one of these two must have sent it to someone else. I didn't send it to anyone else, as I didn't think it actually was Barrett singing. Then suddenly I saw it on tape lists as ‘Barrett w/Beatles 67-04-15.’ I have gotten it several times as filler on tapes and it has always been the same version as the one I got from the Beatles bootleg. They have even played it on Swedish national radio as Barrett w/Beatles. That’s the story of how it ‘was born.’”

Track 11: Syd Barrett – “Milky Way rare mix”
There are one or two legitimate alternate mixes of “Milky Way” floating around. (With only one take in existence, and nothing to mix but a vocal and a guitar, the differences are trivial. The Opel mixdown is the only one that matters.) However, this version includes some pleasant surf guitar and percussion that sounds suspiciously like shoe boxes. Somehow, these overdubs go unmentioned in David Parker’s Random Precision. If they had been found on the master tape, we would have heard them on Opel.

Track 12: Syd Barrett – “Cinnamon Toast”
Outstanding! Finally, somebody’s idea of a joke is genuinely funny. If a Syd parody had ever landed on a National Lampoon LP or been submitted to Dr. Demento, this would’ve been it. This is more “grey area” than hoax per se, since we’re not expected to believe that’s really Syd singing. Famous last words: “Let’s go watch some telly.”

Track 13: Pink Floyd – “See Emily Play, live?, Top of the Pops, 7/67”
And sure enough, here’s the Floyd on TV in mid-67. It’s been rumored that Syd sings a live vocal over the “Emily” single, but the recording quality is so bad it’s a tough call. In fact, we found a reasonably decent source for this track (B+ quality at least), and there doesn’t seem to be any live vocal. There are one or two spots when the double-tracking isn’t perfect, but if you listen closely to the single you’ll hear them in the original. The rougher sound quality does tend to exaggerate these flaws, but the fact is that everybody lip-syncs on Top Of The Pops. There’s no reason to believe they would have rigged up a live microphone just for Syd—the only thing “live” in this track is the bit of applause and announcer at the very end. The truth is, Syd didn’t even want to be there.

Track 14: Pink Floyd – “Piggy Back” (edit)
It’s the dreaded Freak-Out Demos again. This time, “Syd” and “Roger” are working on an “original.” (The title was taken from a 10/66 set list.) Amusingly enough, “Roger” can’t find the riff. He can barely find the E string. The two players are so untogether that this sounds a little like Syd’s 1974 sessions—which is interesting in a way, because nobody had heard them yet. The main riff seems to think it would like to be the intro to “Baby Lemonade” but can’t quite make up its mind. After two or three minutes it becomes impossible to care. We edited this down and faded it early. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss a thing.

Track 15: Syd Barrett – “Chooka Chooka Chug Chug”
There is a legitimate track with this title on the 1974 session reel. It’s 34 seconds long. This track also lasts exactly 34 seconds before it cuts off in mid-note. (Coincidence? Or…destiny?) Since Syd didn’t have titles for most of the tracks, Peter Jenner came up with descriptive names for the various bits that made up this reel. This one was based upon Syd’s guitar rhythm: chooka chooka chug chug.

Why then does this version feature some ass-clown playing a bass through a chorus pedal? (The fact that it was announced by the same individual who had blessed us all with the “Bob Dylan’s Blues demo” a year previous might have something to do with it.)

And what does the ass-clown play? Ooom-pah, ooom-pah, ooom-pah, ooom-pah. As anybody who owns a Syd album already knew…Syd never wrote any polkas.

We’ll give the final word to the person who “discovered” this one—who would care to argue the point? “It has not been known to be on any bootlegs or anything like that. It is very short. Again, we have no proof that the track is real. There are no vocals so it would be hard to pinpoint if the track is indeed a hoax because we don't even know if it is or not. But we believe and several close friends have all said this track sounds indeed real.”

Track 16: Syd Barrett/Kevin Ayers – “Oh Is That, Is That Ummm”
Everybody knows about “Singing A Song In The Morning” by now. With the reissue of Joy Of A Toy, there was no point in including it here. There’s no mystery anymore. Everyone should just go out and buy the thing. I did. And there’s no point in preserving the “acetate version” either, which was merely a low-fi copy of the single. However, there is one other Syd bit of interest on Joy Of A Toy. In this sliver of dialogue before “Song For Insane Times,” it’s rumored you can hear Syd saying the words “Oh is that… is that ummmm?” and then the tune launches in. Maybe it’s Syd, maybe not. I dunno. It sounds like his voice. Grey area.

Track 17: The Soft Machine – “Esther’s Nose Job 3/2/70” (edit)
Supposedly with Syd. His few live shows are very well documented. He once was advertised to appear on a bill with Kevin Ayers for a European gig, but Syd never went. The one time he set foot on a stage in 1970 was the 6/6/70 London show, and they all but had to drag him out. Earlier in the year he was busy making the Barrett album with David Gilmour, not gigging with The Soft Machine. Any questions?

Track 18: Pink Floyd – “Scream Thy Last Scream, mono mix”
Track 19: Pink Floyd – “Vegetable Man, mono mix”
These two songs went unheard until 1975, when they were played on UK radio. Because it includes the DJ patter, this tape might be of some slight historical interest since it documents the occasion. Unfortunately, either the broadcast or the tape deck was in mono. The DJ patter is in mono as well. Underneath the DJ patter at the beginning is “Flaming”—the stereo mix. (It’s easy to distinguish between them; the true mono mix features flanging on the drums.) It’s the stereo mix of “Flaming,” flattened into mono on the tape.

Minus the announcer, these tracks have often been passed off as “mono single mixes,” even though they were never approved for release. There was no special mix done for radio play. We hear what any schmuck would achieve using outdated equipment. In fact, neither track sounds all that good. With authentic stereo mixes in A+ quality available elsewhere on HYGIY?...why care? Some people will collect anything.

Track 20: Syd Barrett – “Last Ever Recording Session 1975” (edit)
Never mind that it was really 1974. What we have here is a chunk from those sessions, but slowed down to half speed. News flash: at 16 RPM, Syd’s guitar sounds like a bass. This might be another attempt at humor. Syd was “on downers” for the sessions. Riiiiight.

There are several of these tracks floating around on peer-to-peer networks, and no need to include them all. It’s interesting listening for a minute or so, though I prefer Chris Squire. Past that point the novelty wears off, and so we pulled the plug.

Track 21: Pink Floyd – “Take Up Thy Stethoscope demo”
The Freak-Out Demos, once more for old time’s sake. This is another deconstruction of a Piper track. We could have included their “Pow R Toc H” instead, but this one includes more of that extra-special guitar work from “Syd.” Then again, we could’ve included “Gimme A Break” from that tape, except it’s an alternate take of “Piggy Back” and features a little too much of that extra-special guitar work from “Syd.” You’re welcome.

Track 22: Pink Floyd – “Stanley The Simpleton”
Syd with the Floyd was at the peak of his powers. This has been purported to be an outtake from 1967, and as such it is an insult to his considerable talents.

Whoever inflicted this one, I’ll give them credit for at least writing a little song and singing it. Most hoaxers are too lazy for that. However, every song Syd recorded with the Floyd has been thoroughly documented. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that there is nothing in EMI’s tape vault titled “Stanley The Simpleton.” It shouldn’t, except for the casual fan or the newcomer who has seen this plastered all over the peer-to-peer networks so many times they figure it must be true.

It isn’t. This was made at some point in the mid-1990s. It’s typical of home-studio recordings from that period. If you listen closely to the echo effects they’re all digital. And the guy doing the singing is nowhere near to a Cambridge accent. (To his credit, the guy who sang “Cinnamon Toast” didn’t even try.) Then there are the lyrics, such as they are, and the melody, such as it is...

Track 23: Steve Peregrin Took – “Molecular Lucky Charm”
Track 24: Steve Peregrin Took – “Syd’s Wine”
Steve Took is mostly remembered today for having been the original percussionist in Tyrannosaurus Rex. One could say Marc Bolan got rid of him for the same reason Mick Jagger got rid of Brian Jones—everything Bolan pretended to be, Took really was. Marc wanted desperately to be a Popstar, and all Steve ever wanted was “to sit under an orange tree, play my guitar in the sun, get stoned and dig the smells and the colours.”

Steve continued writing and recording until his untimely death in 1979, but little came of it at the time. One set of 1972 home recordings was issued in 1995 as Missing Link...(to Tyrannosaurus Rex). There are rumors Syd plays on these two tracks. Unlike various Napster “rumors,” there is at least some plausibility to these.

We don’t know. The Tookie group on Yahoo has been researching the question, but results so far have been inconclusive. There are two people who could verify this. Steve Took is dead. Roger Barrett, if he even recalls Steve Took thirty years later, no longer answers questions. It’s difficult to make certain, because anyone in the London underground community might have dropped in on Steve at some point and been roped into a session. All the “evidence” is circumstantial.

Among the reasons it is suspected Syd may have done so is the fact that Steve had done some session work for Syd in 1968. (He appears on “Lanky” and “Rhamadam.”) It’s thought that Syd might have returned the favor.

Steve Took and Syd were friendly; he was a great admirer of Syd. Given their respective situations they had a lot in common. Both of them had seen something they’d been involved in from the very beginning take on new life after their respective departures. According to Mick Farren in Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, Steve and Syd hung around together in the late 1960s and on occasions Took “dragged Syd along” to things or would be “talking maniacally at Syd.” (According to Farren, part of the reason was that Syd attracted prettier girls than the rest of “The Pink Fairies Drinking Club.”)

Then there’s the fact that these sessions took place at Steve Took’s flat. By 1972 it would have been nearly impossible to get Syd to enter a studio, but there was a decidedly casual vibe at Steve’s place. (Listen closely during one of these tracks and you can hear him fall out of his chair. The other musicians don’t bat an eye.)

Steve’s manager, Tony Secunda, had been Bolan’s manager as well, and Steve didn’t altogether trust him. In fact, he had something close to a phobia at that point about going into a studio, which is why Secunda arranged for a multi-track tape recorder to be installed into Took's living space.

The intent never went beyond making some rough demos to shop around. Steve didn’t keep close track of who played what, although he occasionally entitled a song after someone who had participated—which raises the obvious questions about “Syd’s Wine.”

(We don’t know if Syd was using cocaine circa 1972 but if he was at all interested, that would have been another reason to see Steve Took. As well as furnishing Took with a tape recorder, Secunda provided Took with near-limitless suppliers of cocaine. This has been confirmed by a number of sources including Took’s girlfriend and mother of his son, Lou. She recalls “piles of it. Literally piles.” Syd in the 1970s seems to have preferred downers mostly, but who knows? We don’t. But there is that possibility as well.)

Paul Cox (editor of Terrapin at the time) thanked Steve Took and his girlfriend Lou in one issue for giving him Syd’s home address. This was in 1973/4, which suggests that they remained in contact for some years, even after Syd had moved from London back to his mother’s in Cambridge.

The most interesting bit of “evidence”—we are told Steve credited acoustic guitar on these two tracks to one “crazy diamond.” I would want to see the song sheet in his handwriting to be certain of this; it’s almost too coy to be true. (In any case, these sessions took place in 1972 and nobody would have referred to Syd that way until 1975.)

At this point, there’s no way to know. But they are very nice tracks. They have been processed and edited for this collection, although we left in all the acoustic guitar work that might be Syd’s. (For the originals you’ll need to track down the Steve Took CD.) There are several excellent Steve Took resources on the web. Chief among them is “Steve Peregrin Took’s Domain.” More on Steve’s career, biography and unreleased recordings can be found there at http://www.steve-took.co.uk.

Track 25 – Pink Floyd/Hawkwind – “Heckty Skies”
With much fanfare, there was an announcement in late 2001 of a newly discovered track, “unknown to the Barrett world. It is rumored to have been recorded in late ’67 or early ’68 at the BBC Sound Workshop. With lyrics like “couch my disease and chinse covered kisses, glazed calico cloak my costume misses” this is a definite [must] for all Barrett and Floyd collectors. The lyrics are a rewrite of Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Ballade to Our Lady of Czestochowa.’”

Perhaps somebody got the idea into their head by misinterpreting the lyrics. They seemed to think the first four lines went, “Guttle of white insanity/Counting dread in some vanity/This is hardly paradise/We’re off in search of Heckty Skies.” The last two words are actually “petty scorn,” and there will be no shortage of that.

I’d never before heard this attributed to Syd, but a day or two later I was told in a private email, “The ‘Chinese Kisses’ track did the rounds a few years ago. It was labeled as a PF ’67 BBC Radiophonic Workshop recording and/or some Syd collaboration with some Hawkwind members?? It sounds NOTHING like Syd, and PF did not record anything at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This is confirmed by David Parker’s research in Random Precision.”

A moot point. It’s Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel. The song is “Ritz,” and the album is The Psychomodo, released in 1974. Their finest, and “Ritz” is arguably the best song on it. (Hawkwind’s debut was recorded in 1969, by the way. None of them had done anything to warrant a BBC session in late ’67, and none is on record.)

If anyone had asked, we could have crushed this one years ago. As it was, we made certain inquiries. Steve Harley was amused. He confirmed what we already knew: the song has no connection with Syd Barrett. It has even less to do with Belloc, except in somebody’s fantasy world. And for the record, the correct lyric is as follows: “Couch my disease in chintz covered kisses/Glazed calico cloth, my costume this is/Come to Pablo Fanque’s In Indigo/And we'll show you pastel shades of rhyme.”

It was soon announced: “We had doubts if the track was a real Barrett track. We were very hesitant about putting it on our collection. At least we know now, thanks to the Laughing Madcaps group that is not Syd Barrett and we thank you for that.”

We’re all about public service.

As with the Steve Took tracks, this one has been slightly edited and processed. The original can be found on The Psychomodo by Cockney Rebel, and we highly recommend it. More information about Cockney Rebel can be found at http://www.steveharley.com. About the only thing Steve Harley has in common with Syd is that both took a lot of acid when they were younger—but this is one of his finest songs and he deserves proper credit for it. Let those who deserve it deal with the petty scorn. Honi soit!